The Digest

The United States is home to world-class universities that attract hundreds of thousands of international students each year. Between 2000 and 2015, the number of international students who received either a bachelor’s or master’s degree from a US college or university ranged between 500,000 and 1 million per year. Many of these students acquired substantial human capital in the course of their studies. Whether these graduates deploy their skills in the US labor market...

Scientists and engineers tend to work more productively in high-tech-intensive cities. With more opportunities to network with their peers, they appear to benefit from knowledge spillovers, and their firms benefit from a larger labor pool. Productivity gains — defined as the number of patents produced in a year — increase steadily when firms in cities with smaller concentrations of research and development activity are compared to those in localities with larger...

The US dollar appreciated by 23 percent against a broad basket of other currencies between January 2011 and December 2019, and has continued its appreciation since then. In Understanding the Strength of the Dollar (NBER Working Paper 30558), Zhengyang Jiang, Robert J. Richmond, and Tony Zhang analyze factors that contributed to the dollar’s rise. They estimate that global growth in investor savings accounted for appreciation of 8.7 percent, relatively tight US central...